New York at War (22 page)

Yet the British navy’s show of force was more ambiguous than appearances suggested. London wanted to cripple American trade to end the war. But the pressing British imperative was to defeat Napoleon in Europe, an effort that required tons of foodstuffs and supplies for the redcoats slogging through a tough ground war against the French in Spain—matériel that America could offer in abundance. In short, the blockade of America worked at cross purposes with the war effort on the continent, and the pragmatic attraction of using American wheat, flour, pork, and beef to feed redcoats in Spain produced a highly porous blockade. British consuls routinely signed licenses that allowed American ship captains to sail without molestation to ports where their trade would aid the English war effort. While the British repeatedly changed the rules, at times tightening the blockade and disallowing licenses, a well-informed shipper looking out to sea from South Street had a fighting chance of remaining in business—although doing so might well entail trading with the enemy.
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Thus, during the summer of 1812, when the
Guerriere
and other frigates were seizing American vessels off Sandy Hook, dozens of others were arriving safely at their Manhattan berths. To be sure, some were light, swift coasters that had slipped through Hell Gate or beat the British to the Narrows. But many, sailing in flagrant violation of the federal Non-Intercourse Act prohibiting trade with Britain, carried British licenses. If they could endure the sneers of patriotic onlookers, merchants and seamen could still make money, and safely, by keeping the overseas British war machine well oiled. And even patriots had to admit that such loopholes kept the city from feeling the full economic brunt of John Bull’s wrath. When Madison tried to crack down on such commerce as a brazen betrayal of the war effort, he faced significant resistance in Congress before American vessels sailing under enemy licenses were made illegal.
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With British warships plying the waters off Sandy Hook and Long Island, New Yorkers took the threat of attack very seriously. They faced it with Jonathan Williams’s chain of harbor forts and with several new batteries that were rushed to completion on the Greenwich Village shore, at Corlears Hook facing the Navy Yard, and on Staten Island overlooking the Narrows. But the protection of New York would also take soldiers, and before long the city was playing host to a motley array of militia units. The city itself mustered ten regiments of infantrymen, three artillery regiments, and a cavalry squadron. There was the Old Butcher Troop, consisting exclusively of men of that vocation, dressed in buckskin breeches and blue coats trimmed with silver lace. The Brooklyn Fusiliers were popularly known as the Katydids for the green and yellow of their uniforms. By early 1813, 3,500 New York and New Jersey militiamen and US Army troops guarded the city, most of them posted to the harbor forts.
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Yet officials and officers warned that more men were needed. With a frugal Congress refusing to expand the ranks of the regular army, states tried to rely on their own militias. Able-bodied men ages eighteen to forty-five were legally obliged to serve in the state militia, but New Yorkers both upstate and down resented duty as a burden that took them away from their workshops or farms. Once the war began, bad news from Canada, where American forces initially stumbled from one humiliating disaster to another, hindered militia enlistments. Instead, many New Yorkers eligible for militia duty evaded it. Rich men paid substitutes to serve in their place, as they were legally entitled to do; poorer men did not show up for musters or disappeared. The need for men produced the inevitable abuses; some made a wartime career of repeatedly enlisting for bounty money and deserting. One bounty jumper, caught and jailed on Governors Island, was put in front of a firing squad, blindfolded—and pardoned at the last second.
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While Daniel Tompkins, New York governor and commander of the Third US Military District, worried about inadequate numbers, he also fretted about the caliber of the men who
had
shown up. Whether from the far reaches of the Catskills or the Manhattan streets, the average militiaman was unruly and insufficiently trained. Moreover, arms and ammunition were in short supply. Few militiamen reenlisted after their ninety-day terms expired; green troops, ignorant of the rudiments of harbor defense, took their place. Major General Morgan Lewis complained that militia officers “permit their men to stray from their camp at all hours.” One militiaman caught in larceny was led through the streets to the doleful melody of “The Rogue’s March” with a sign reading “Thief ” hanging around his neck; worse still, he was deprived of his whiskey ration for one month.
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One group of volunteers did render heroic service. Mobilized in the fall of 1812, the Sea Fencibles were meant to serve both on land and at sea as a “marine militia.” Their mission was to guard the port’s outer fringe, where the lonely sandbars and bluffs facing the Atlantic offered the British potential landings for invasion. The five hundred men of the Fencibles were recruited largely from the ranks of the city’s seamen, boatmen, and fishermen, men liable to Royal Navy impressment and thus with a score to settle. Their commander, Jacob Lewis, had captained a privateer, the
Bunker Hill
, at the start of the war. While his surviving letters suggest a man of some education and literary polish, he was also at home in the East River’s boatyards and sail lofts, and he shared the egalitarian republicanism of his men.

The weapons of the Sea Fencibles were the musket, the boarding pike, and, most importantly, the forty-five-foot gunboat armed with one or two cannon. Essentially a long rowboat, propelled by oars or by sail, it could carry about three dozen armed men. From its base at Spermaceti Cove within the arm of Sandy Hook, Lewis’s flotilla of thirty-one gunboats moved swiftly through the port’s waters. The Federalist gentlemen who populated the navy’s officer corps might smirk at this seaborne rabble, but New York City’s government—thankful for any help it could get in protecting the coast—didn’t. As for Commodore Lewis, he had full confidence in his men. “They shall be amphibious soldiers,” he wrote to Secretary of State James Monroe. “I am perfectly satisfied to command what has been always despised by the Navy.”
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For two years, Lewis and his men played cat and mouse with the British. In late March 1813, Admiral Warren announced to the admiralty his intention of seizing Sandy Hook and making it a base for British depredations on American shipping into and out of New York. Such a move would effectively make the British blockade of the Narrows airtight, and afford a launching point for further operations. Lewis, and other New Yorkers, sensed what was coming. “The enemy are at the Hook” was “the universal cry of the city,” he wrote to Navy Secretary William Jones in May. A week later, seven boatloads of British sailors from the blockading warships tried to land on the Hook, relying on the dead of night and muffled oars to surprise the Fencibles stationed there; they were scared off when the aroused sentries started firing on them. The raid may have been less a concerted invasion than a ploy by the timorous Warren to appease an impatient admiralty. Nonetheless, the presence of the Fencibles had deterred a British assault on the city’s threshold.
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Next, Lewis took the war to the British. On the Fourth of July, his men disguised a pilot boat, the
Yankee
, as a fishing smack. Three men posed as fishermen on deck; forty-three others, armed with muskets, hid on the foredeck and in the cabin. Sailing off the Hook, the
Yankee
soon lured its target, the British sloop of war
Eagle
, which had been seizing fishing boats and burning vessels at will. As the British sloop drew alongside, the Fencibles jumped from their cover and opened fire, killing a master’s mate and a midshipman and capturing eleven Royal Marines. Jubilant spectators lined the Whitehall Dock at Manhattan’s tip as the Sea Fencibles delivered the
Eagle
and its crew to the people of New York City as an Independence Day gift. Two months later, Lewis took twenty-six gunboats up the East River and through Hell Gate to harass a British frigate and schooner that were seizing vessels and landing sailors near Rye to steal sheep. After an artillery exchange in which neither side hit the other, the confrontation ended inconclusively. But the British ships withdrew toward the east end of Long Island Sound, and the Sea Fencibles could claim the skirmish as a victory.
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Lewis’s Fencibles proved their mettle on land as well as at sea. One British tactic for taking American prizes was to drive them aground on New Jersey’s Atlantic shore as they tried to make a run into New York, and Lewis kept his men on the lookout for vessels in distress. In November 1813, the schooner
John and Mary
, bound from New Orleans to New York with a lucrative cargo of cotton, sugar, and lead, lurched to a stop on the beach near the village of Long Branch, twelve miles south of Spermaceti Cove. Trapped by the predatory Captain Lloyd’s seventy-four-gun
Plantagenet
, the hapless crew stood by as British sailors looted their schooner. Suddenly, one hundred Sea Fencibles materialized out of the dunes, having marched south from Sandy Hook. The Britons scattered to their boats and headed back to their mother ship. Captain Lloyd sent another boat ashore under a flag of truce. Lloyd insisted indignantly that the
John and Mary
was a legitimate prize of war. But he was also a reasonable man, and he offered to ransom the schooner and its cargo for $1,000. If the Americans refused, the
Plantagenet
would use its cannon to pummel Long Branch village, as well as the
John and Mary
, to pieces.

The Fencibles vowed to defend the grounded vessel. Under a cannonade from the British ship offshore, the Americans managed to offload much of the
John and Mary
’s cargo and cart it away; only one man was wounded. Losing interest, Lloyd sailed off in search of new prey, without leveling Long Branch. In January, the scene repeated itself, when the “flotilla men” marched down the beach again, this time dragging field artillery with them, to drive the British away from another grounded schooner, this one loaded with coal. The Fencibles safely and triumphantly brought the vessel into New York harbor. The boatmen of New York were proving to be their city’s first and most pugnacious line of defense.
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Serving under arms was not the only way New Yorkers could defend their homes. War inflamed the imaginations of the city’s mechanical tinkerers. Among them was Robert Fulton, an engineer who, while busy building the world’s first truly viable steamboat in New York harbor, was convinced that his true place in history was as an inventor of weapons. Fulton had spent a decade in Europe trying to interest the British and French governments in sponsoring his two pet projects: a “plunging machine,” or submarine for military use, and a “torpedo”—really a floating mine for blowing up enemy warships.
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Fulton’s submarine was inspired by the Turtle, a contraption launched in New York harbor during the summer of 1776 by a Continental army soldier named David Bushnell. A pod-shaped wooden shell operated by a single passenger, the Turtle was supposed to get alongside the hull of Admiral Howe’s flagship and attach a time bomb to it. The attempt proved abortive—as did Fulton’s later efforts to interest the British and Napoleon in his refinements of Bushnell’s design. Fulton arrived in New York in 1806, at the right moment to interest the city fathers and Jonathan Williams in his torpedoes—floating wooden boxes containing gunpowder and detonators that exploded on impact or when set off by a clockwork timer. Once more, glory eluded him; before a crowd of thousands gathered at the Battery, Fulton floated torpedoes toward an abandoned brig anchored offshore, but as a spectator reported, “the brig most obstinately refused to be
decomposed
.”
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More successful was the scheme hatched by one John Scudder Jr. and two Manhattan merchants. In June 1813 Scudder fitted out a schooner, the
Eagle
, with a cargo to tantalize His Majesty’s navy—barrels of flour, provisions, and naval stores. Below decks, however, he imbedded a deadly booby trap: ten kegs of gunpowder and a cask of sulphur, concealed next to gunlocks that would fire when a cord tied to two flour barrels was jerked. Scudder and a small crew sailed the
Eagle
through Hell Gate into the waters off New London, where Sir Thomas Hardy, commander of HMS
Ramillies
, took the bait. After Scudder’s crew fled for shore, Hardy’s men seized the schooner, anchored it near the British frigate, and began unloading cargo. Scudder watched anxiously from the shore for over three hours. Then, suddenly, “a column of fire” shot up several hundred feet, raining pitch and tar down on the
Ramillies
’s deck. The
Eagle
, a British lieutenant, and ten of his sailors were instantly “blown to atoms.” The only disappointment was that the explosion spared the
Ramillies
and its six hundred crewmen.
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For a moment Scudder and his comrades were the toast of the South Street taverns, but Robert Fulton was not to be outshone. By early 1814 he was planning his pièce de résistance of port defense: a massive behemoth of a ship designed to make New York harbor unassailable. Called both
Fulton I
and
Demologos
(“The People Speak”), it would be the world’s first steam-powered warship, the culmination of the inventor’s career as a visionary of steam propulsion and mechanized weaponry. Paid for by Congress, which spent close to a quarter of a million dollars in expectation that it would become a prototype for coastal defense, its gargantuan wooden hull gradually took form in a shipyard at Corlears Hook on the East River. A workforce of 260 men built its hull and machinery. Its foundry-cast engine cylinder, weighing over three tons and “said to be equal to 120 horses,” was ready in July. Measuring 167 feet long, 56 feet in the beam, with vast paddle wheels and a hull 5 feet thick,
Demologos
would be a floating battery, carrying thirty-two guns firing “red hot shot,” some of it weighing a hundred pounds—a mobile version of the forts with which Jonathan Williams had lined the city’s approaches. Unlike every other military vessel afloat, it would not be at the mercy of wind or tide but would move under its own steam power at up to five miles an hour. At a height of twenty feet above the water line,
Demologos
towered over other vessels. No British flotilla brazen enough to brave the Narrows, Fulton believed, would dare face it.
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